1. Field of the Present Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate, in general, to network management applications. More specifically, the embodiments of the present invention relate to a method and system for run-time customization of network management applications.
2. Description of the Background Art
Various network elements are required for communication across networks. Examples of network elements include, but are not limited to, hubs, switches, routers, and brouters. Commercially available network management systems, such as Craft Works Interface (CWI), enable network administrators to manage and monitor networks and network elements.
Network management systems provide network management applications for configuring and managing the network elements in the network. Configuration and management of the network elements includes fault correction, security management and inventory management. In addition, network management applications enable network administrators to also retrieve information from these network elements. The retrieved information includes, but is not limited to, performance statistics and memory usage statistics of the network elements.
However, these network management applications are fixed applications and are predefined by developers of the network management applications to configure and manage common network elements and parameters. Therefore, while network administrators may have a specific requirements for a particular network, they must use the predefined network management application as it is. Alternatively, the network administrator could request the developers to customize the network management application to accomplish the specific requirement but this is a slow and expensive process. Even with a customized version of the network management application, the network administrator usually will have to provide feedback to the developers to further improve the customized network management application. Clearly, this constitutes a long delivery cycle for the customized application and requires on-going maintenance and bug fixing by the developers. It will be appreciated that the maintenance and error fixing of a customized network management application is an expense that most developers would rather minimize or not incur if possible.
Providing customized applications that satisfy specific requests of the network administrator as well as responding to changing requirement over time is difficult and time consuming for the developers because there is little ability to achieve economy of scale. Further, different network administrators often have unique requirements, it is not possible for the developers to fulfill all of these unique requirements with a single or even multiple predefined applications.